Dead Sea Scrolls mystery deepens as AI finds manuscripts to be much older than thought
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New study rewrites history of the Dead Sea Scrolls
- A new study combining radiocarbon dating and AI analysis suggests that many Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previously thought.
- The discovery could potentially transform our understanding of Jewish and Christian origins.
- The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, are ancient Jewish texts written mainly in Hebrew and contain the oldest Bible texts ever found, dating back 1,800 to 2,000 years.
- Researchers trained an AI model to analyse handwritten ink patterns and digitised manuscripts, cross-verifying it with already-dated texts, achieving age predictions with an uncertainty of about 30 years.
- The AI analysis confirmed that some Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly those in Hasmonaean and Herodian scripts, could be from the late second century BC, earlier than the previously estimated mid-first century BC.